# 8. Future improvements

Once the basic setup is working, consider implementing the following:

- **MySQL:** Replace SQLite with MySQL for persistent production database storage.
- **Authentication:** Protect endpoints using API keys or token-based authentication. The [backend-api](https://git.gansejunge.com/notifier/backend-api/src/branch/main/src/main.py) has an example
- **Logging:** Replace `print()` statements with Python's `logging` module.
- **Error handling:** Handle database connection failures and invalid requests.
- **Configuration:** Move database paths, ports and other settings into environment variables.
- **Deployment** - Use Docker with docker-compose to run self hosted images from